In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Stan Vanderbeek was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the experimental film scene, churning out primarily collage films featuring original footage cut up with found imagery.

At the same time, he was also a prodigious film theorist, producing articles on film theory in much the same way he made his films — by combining original writing with text and images created by others. One of Vanderbeek’s most famous articles is “The Cinema Delimina” published in the Summer 1961 edition of Film Quarterly (vol. Xiv no. 4), in which he is the first person to use the term “underground” to refer to what was then mostly referred to as “experimental cinema.”

To be clear, though, Vanderbeek actually did not use the exact term “underground film.”

The gist of the article appears to be Vanderbeek arguing that experimental films should be considered as something better than...